1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a shooting technique and, more particularly, to a shooting technique for monitoring.
2. Description of the Related Art
Latent demand for viewing the situation at remote areas, particularly in view of public safety, and new ways to use cameras are being studied from various standpoints inclusive of the technical aspects.
For example, against a background of more widespread use and higher speeds of network environments typified by the Internet, so-called network cameras that make it possible to view video from a remote location are becoming increasingly popular. In addition, the processing capability of speech and image is being improved and technologies relating to advanced speech detection and speech recognition, advanced video detection and video recognition are being studied. In view of the foregoing, various techniques for performing recognition and detection using speech and video.
There are examples of techniques utilizing recognition and detection. For example, the specification of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 8-297792 proposes a technique for sensing a change in state using an amount of motion or sound above a threshold value. The specification of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-341334 proposes a technique for inferring a speaker from the result of recognition of input speech and taking a close-up of the speaker in accordance with shooting conditions set beforehand in conformity with the speaker.
On the other hand, there are examples of techniques that utilize a plurality of recognition apparatuses. For example, the specification of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-116796 proposes a technique for sending input speech to all recognition apparatuses using a plurality of speech recognition apparatuses connected to a network and adopting the result from the speech recognition apparatus whose recognition result has the highest score. The specification of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-182896 proposes a technique directed to a case where a plurality of speech recognition engines exist having speech recognition apparatuses for a small vocabulary locally and a large vocabulary remotely, wherein the speech recognition engine used is decided in response to the user clearly designating which engine should be utilized.
However, in case of utilization for monitoring or the like, the apparatus often is operated in an unmanned situation. Although it is true that sensing and recognition performance has been improved, there are not a few cases where these sensing and recognition functions are still not adequate, in terms of processing load and accuracy, to satisfy the requirement for use in unmanned situations.